Articles - Z-Health / Pain Relief
The Pain Neuromatrix
By Brian Copeland
How many of you are frustrated with one of the following:
- Chronic Pain?
- Chronic Tight Muscles?
- Inflexibility?
- Weakness in certain movements?
- Poor Posture?
- Kinks in the Neck?
- Twinges in the Low Back?
- Achy Knees?
Let's explain the different between chronic and acute for our non-medical types. Chronic simply refers to an ongoing issue while accute is a short-term issue. So accute pain might be where you bump your knee into a cabinet, you get that quick "OWCH!" and then it goes away. Even if there is some slight soreness that usually goes away after a few days. Chronic pain on the other hand is where you might be feeling an ongoing constant pain in your low back or other area of the body, and you aren't really sure why. Sure you may lift something heavy and it gets worse but it was already touchy before.
Accute pain makes sense, right? Bump your head on a shelf and it will hurt. I totally get it!
Chronic pain does not make sense... Sure we try to explain it with phrases that have more subjectivity than actual meaning...
- "I have a trick back"
- "My knees are weak"
- "I have a bad neck"
- "I have my mother's ankles"
Well there is no such thing as a "trick back" unless you have taught it to do tricks like a dog. Your knees are not weak, I promise you, mothers have been known to lift cars in extreme situations such as their child trapped underneath. What exactly is a bad neck? Does it mean that it will always be bad and can't get better? And if you have your mother's ankles you might want to give them back to her since she may need them.
Ultimately without an objective scientific look at our perceived pains, weaknesses, etc. we have to come up with answers that don't really get us to a place where we can make positive changes. Wouldn't making positive changes be better than just accepting that you have a "trick back?"
Pain is incredibly complex yet quite simple at the same time.
It is simple because sometimes the reason for pain is obvious, such as a knife through the arm hurts!
But pain can be very complex, such as in phantom limb pain. An amputee has a leg removed but complains to the doctor that his foot hurts or his toes are on fire. The concept of pain where A = B (like the knife through the leg) being the cause of pain simply does not work in this situation.
Some very smart folks in the medical world have been trying to unlock the pain model for a long time and the theories have changed several times. Yet if you ask most people and most doctors they will tell you that A = B. Meaning if your shoulder hurts then there is something wrong with the muscle, tendons, ligaments, etc. of your shoulder...
But did you know that pain in your left shoulder, arm, hand and/or chest could mean that you are having heart problems?
Angina, pain in the left side of the chest, shoulder, arm and hand are early warning signs of a heart attack. Now if you just thought that you injured your rotator's cuff muscles then you would be ignoring a serious threat!
Did you know that low back or hip pain could mean there is something wrong with your kidneys?
It gets even stranger... stick with me...
The Descartes Pain Model created circa 1664
In Descartes Pain Model above we can clearly see that as the foot touches the fire, a signal is sent via peripheral nerves in the foot to the spinal cord and up to the brain which means you now feel pain. While this is not necessarily incorrect in this example, pain is actually far more complex and modern science has discovered what Descartes in 1664 couldn't have possibly known... that pain can come from your emotional state and your expectations!
In 1999 Dr. Ronald Melzack Ph.D coined the term "Pain Neuromatrix" which has radically changed the way we look at pain in the human body. The Pain Neuromatrix basically is an understanding that pain is not necessarily created by a pathalogical event. Meaning it does not have to be from a knife in the leg.
Dr. Melzack along with his colleague Dr. Patrick Wall years ealier had discovered that pain could be caused by emotional states and cognitive thought processes. This is likely where the phrase "it is all in your head" started to pop up.
So is pain all-in-your-head? Well... Yes and No.
 Pain is all in your head in the sense that you do not "feel" pain in your body, you have nerves in your body which send signals to your brain. The brain then goes through a complex process that happens in miliseconds that determines whether it needs to make you feel pain or not. If the anser is "yes" then you will experience pain.
So let's say you step on a nail and the nail goes into your foot... yikes! A signal will travel via nerves to your spinal cord and then up to your brain. The brain will decide if the signal is dangerous enough (or threatening enough) to warrant your attention. If the answer is "yes" then you will experience pain in your foot. However, the pain is actually being created in your brain by your brain, not by the nail... It is a response in reaction to the nail... does that make sense?
Think of it this way. If you did not feel pain then you might not realize there was a nail in your foot. So the brain needs a way to make you realize there is a nail so you go get stitches, etc. Thus it creates pain to make you take action.
So what is pain?
It is an action signal from your brain. It is your brain telling you that it wants you to do something.
Pain is far more complicated than the nail in the foot action signal. Far more.
Did you realize that you can experience pain and have absolutely nothing wrong?
Well nothing wrong physically that is. The Pain Neuromatrix states that pain is a Sensory, Cognitive and/or Emotional event.
What does that mean...?
Sensory = nail in the foot. Signals sent to the brain via nociceptive nerve endings.
Cognitive = you manifest it in your head via your own thoughts, usually an active fear or dislike of something. More on this in a moment.
Emotional = when you are in a bad emotional state you are more likely to feel pain, when you are flying on cloud 9 you are less likely to feel pain. Emotions can turn the pain volume up or down.
I'm sure you have no problems thinking of examples of sensory pain: the knife in the leg, nail in the foot, touching a hot stove, coffee was too hot, etc. But let's explore cognitive and emotional pain a little further.
Have you ever walked on hot coals before? If not then surely you have seen it on TV or read about it in magazines. Usually someone is teaching self empowerment to get over your fears or some right of passage or whatever.
But here is the deal... it looks hot, the coals are hot, but then the first woman walks across the hot coals and gets to the other side with a big surprised look on her face. She felt no pain!
Clearly if the coals were hot enough to cause  severe injury she would have felt pain and her feet would be badly burned.
Now person 2 goes to walk across the hot coals. Person 2 has a deep fear of fire. He looks at the hot coals for a while, dreading the experience the whole time. Finally with much trepidation he cautiously takes one foot and lightly touches the first toe on his foot to a single coal...
"OUWCH!!!!!!!"
He yanks his foot away and says "I can't do this!"
Now let me ask you a question... Did the temperature of the coals change? Person #3 walks on them and has no problem.
What was different between persons 1, 2 and 3. Well person 2 expected it to hurt and thus it did. This is how the cognitive (or conscious) part of your brain can make you feel pain or increase your pain level.
Remember earlier when we said that pain was an action signal? The brain wants to protect you at all costs. If you cognitively are scared of the hot coals and believe cognitively that you will get hurt then your precognitive (or sub-conscious) brain that is responsible for pain, will stop you! It will send you a pain signal to keep you from walking on those hot coals.
So now we understand that sensory input can cause pain... of course we knew that, but now we understand that cognitive input can change pain too! The person walking on the hot coals had a fear of hot coals that created a pain signal. Now let's discuss emotional pain.
Years ago Boeing Corp. had a lot of worker's comp. issues for low back pain. They decided to hire a research firm to figure out what the cause was. The research firm looked at every single possible variable: age, race, gender, weight, exercise habits, nutrition, officer worker vs. shop worker, manager vs. workforce level, whether someone liked their boss, their job, etc.
The only single factor they found was... job satisfaction!
No joke, job satisfaction was the only common denominator for low back pain at Boeing!
So just as sensory input and cognitive input can cause pain, so can emotional input.
Sensory, cognitive and emotional input rarely work alone. The hot coals were hot but not hot enough to cause injury, but hot enough to feel hot. The cognitive fear of the hot coals allowed the brain to look at the heat information from the nerves in the foot and multiply that input.
My mother drinks coffee so hot that I can't even hold the cup! We are talking scolding McDonalds hot or hotter! Now for her, that level of heat brings pleasure when she sips on it. Me on the other hand can't even hold the cup. So here is an example of sensory information (heat from the coffee) and cognitive information (pleasure or fear of the level of heat) and for one person it is awesome and others it hurts.
I remember a story Dr. Eric Cobb told me. He was doing hand stands with his daughter in the yard, when he came down he did some kind of roll but didn't realize there was a rock burried in the grass. He came down on his collar bone and broke it. He said it was the worst pain he had ever felt, that means a lot coming from a guy that has spent his whole life teaching combatives and martial arts. He said the only thing that could elieviate the pain was when he looked at a photo hanging on his wall. I don't recall what the photo was of but it was a of fond memory and thus created great emotional pleasure. He said his pain decreased by about 70% while looking at the picture, when he looked away the pain came back. Long story short he took the photo with him to the hospital.
In Z-Health we use the term "threat" to determine how the brain will react to something. If we understand that the brain's first priority is survival, not performance, then we can now appreciate that anything that the brain finds threatening will create a survival response... right?
Let's look at some common survival or threat responses:
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Remember the game we played as kids where you pretend to punch at someone's face and then say what? ..."Made you flinch!" Remember how you would say, "I won't flinch next time!" And then minutes later they will punch at your face again and you would flinch again? Yeah that is a hard-wired threat response you can't really turn off.
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How about touching a hot iron or stove, ever done that? Did you smell something burning, feel something hot, look and see your hand touching the stove and then decide to pull your hand away...? OR did you flinch, yell, look at your hand and then try to figure out what just happened... see the iron and realize you just touched the iron? Right, you flinched first and then realized what you did.
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If you have ever pulled a muscle you will recall how your body got tight, especially around the injured area. This tightness prevents excessive movement which could tear the muscle further. This too is a survival response.
Do you see how all of these are signals to the brain that create threat or fear in the brain? They all create something that the brain feels it needs to survive from and protect you from.
Your brain's survival reflexes all happen precognitively (sub-consciously) which means they happens automatically.
So when you say "pain" I think, "what is their body trying to survive from?"
So now that we understand that pain is an action signal created by the brain, a survival response to a perceived threat... the next question is what is causing the pain and is it legit or not?
Here is where it gets complex...
 We have already learned that pain can be caused by a very real injury such as a nail through the foot or a burn from a hot iron. But we have also learned that pain can be caused by a negative emotional state to job disatisfaction or a rational or irrational fear of hot coals or whatever.
And for the record, these are only examples, there are numerous things that the brain can find threatening enough to cause a pain signal.
So we must ask the questions:
- What is it that the brain is trying to make us survive from?
- Is there a real threat or is it emotional or cognitive?
If you haven't already read the article about Where You Hurt May Not Be Why You Hurt that is a great article that will help make more sense of joint pains.
An injury is what I would call legit pain, meaning it might require you to take immediate action. A broken bone will require immediate action but a bump on the knee might just require you to wait for natural healing to take place.
But what about emotional pain... do you need to take immediate action on that?
Well I guess that depends on if you think it is healthy to work at a job that you hate. We all know that stress leads to high blood pressure, heart disease and other health problems. It is your life so you make the call.
What about a fear of hot coals... do you need to take immediate action to fix this?
Well I guess that depends on if you need to ever be able to walk on hot coals. Most of us probably won't. But what if your fear is of claustrophobia? A fear of small spaces. Might you need to be able to sit in the back seat of a car, or an airplane seat? Maybe you do need to take action on getting rid of your claustrophobia. Now that isn't an easy thing on your own, you will probably need professional help but you should take charge of your life and take steps to curing yourself.
Since we now understand that sensory pain is an action signal in response to a perceived threat, how can we use that information to help eliminate pain?
Well first off we don't want to get rid of ALL pain do we? If you step on a nail wouldn't you want to know about it? What we want to get rid of is uneccessary pain.
Second, the single biggest threat to the human body and thus the single biggest cause of uneccessary pain is a lack of athleticism... Let that sink in for a moment.
The less athletic someone is aren't they less coordinated? Aren't they more likely to slip and fall? What are the hallmarks of an amazing athlete? Coordination, strength, flexibility, suppleness, resistant to injury (at least in a well rounded athlete), good visual skills (think catch or duck the snowball flying at your face), quick reaction skills (think sensing the nail under foot before putting all of your weight on it).
Thus the better athlete you are, the safer you are and the less things that can cause threat to your brain. Simple!
How do you become a better athlete?
Move better! Simple!
How do you move better? Z-Health! Simple! Well simple if you are willing to put in the hard work.
So the next time someone says "pain is all in your head" you can answer, "well yes pain is created in your head as a response to threat."
The Pain Neuromatrix states that pain is a sensory, cognitive and emotional event.
Pain is an action signal from your brain telling you to take change or do something different.
Accute pain is usually legit but chronic pain is usually uneccessary and needs to be addressed.
Pain, weakness and tight muscles are really all the same thing, just different levels. They are all ways for your brain to protect you from injury.
When you think pain, weakness or tight muscles ask yourself "what threat is my brain responding to?"
Better athletes feel less pain, that does not mean athletes feel less pain, that means athletes with better movement feel less pain. There are great athletes who are full of pain because they move poorly but they have mental toughness to push through it.
Z-Health dynamic joint mobility creates better movement.
R-Phase is the best place to start to learn better movement.
Focus on moving better and creating mobility and strength in every single joint in your body and you will feel less pain, be stronger, more flexible and less likely to be injured.
Train Like an ATHLETE Not a Hamster!
Brian
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